My (Grand) Parents Home
The images in this series document the town of Milford, Delaware, the small town in which my grandparents lived the last years of their lives. My grandfather died when I was six and my grandmother began her final years in a nursing home shortly thereafter. I never knew them well enough to define any impact they had on my life. In their will they left their home to my parents who have hung onto it to this day. Everything inside those walls is as it was when my grandmother moved out. No one has remodeled, no one has really talked about selling it. Occasionally my parents will show up to rake the leaves in the front yard. And so it remains this kind of time capsule full of clues about their lives and how I maybe could have related to them had I been old enough.
In many ways I connect more closely to the town in which they live. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and headlines in the local paper read something like, “High school student balances homework and job”, or “children paint mural on local wall”. In Milford, this was as big as it got. But it’s growing; the small stores people grew to trust can no longer compete with nationwide chains. The local landscape that surrounds their home, once full of rolling farms and wetlands is, for the first time, threatened.
But despite all of this, my grandparent’s home stays exactly the same. Sometimes I’m reluctant to even move things in their house, because I might not be able to get it back the way it was. In the way that their home has become a shrine, there is something profoundly spiritual about being in the landscape around their home. The wide open corn field at the end of their street and the marshy beach just down the road have been just as much a part of “my grandparents” as the people I struggle to remember. In many ways, this home and the landscape it sits on is that elderly, conservative force in my life that I missed out on. So I’m documenting it now before this house is finally sold, before all the open land that surrounds it is turned into strip malls, and before the experience of understanding my own grandparents gets swept away by the evolution of the space around them.
The images in this series document the town of Milford, Delaware, the small town in which my grandparents lived the last years of their lives. My grandfather died when I was six and my grandmother began her final years in a nursing home shortly thereafter. I never knew them well enough to define any impact they had on my life. In their will they left their home to my parents who have hung onto it to this day. Everything inside those walls is as it was when my grandmother moved out. No one has remodeled, no one has really talked about selling it. Occasionally my parents will show up to rake the leaves in the front yard. And so it remains this kind of time capsule full of clues about their lives and how I maybe could have related to them had I been old enough.
In many ways I connect more closely to the town in which they live. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and headlines in the local paper read something like, “High school student balances homework and job”, or “children paint mural on local wall”. In Milford, this was as big as it got. But it’s growing; the small stores people grew to trust can no longer compete with nationwide chains. The local landscape that surrounds their home, once full of rolling farms and wetlands is, for the first time, threatened.
But despite all of this, my grandparent’s home stays exactly the same. Sometimes I’m reluctant to even move things in their house, because I might not be able to get it back the way it was. In the way that their home has become a shrine, there is something profoundly spiritual about being in the landscape around their home. The wide open corn field at the end of their street and the marshy beach just down the road have been just as much a part of “my grandparents” as the people I struggle to remember. In many ways, this home and the landscape it sits on is that elderly, conservative force in my life that I missed out on. So I’m documenting it now before this house is finally sold, before all the open land that surrounds it is turned into strip malls, and before the experience of understanding my own grandparents gets swept away by the evolution of the space around them.